{"id":2020861,"date":"2026-06-30T18:39:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T15:39:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2020861"},"modified":"2026-06-30T18:39:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T15:39:12","slug":"im-youngzoos-the-late-meditates-on-belief-and-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2020861","title":{"rendered":"IM Youngzoo’s ‘The Late’ Meditates on Belief and Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/s01-16.png?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tIt\u2019s hot out and the sun must be at its zenith because you can spot a woman\u2019s shadow against the parched asphalt as she walks down the street. The woman, however, isn\u2019t quite visible. Sometimes you see a bit of her hat, her jacket, or her hands, but mostly she is obscured by a spray of scattered light that warps the world around it. At \u201cThe Late,\u201d artist IM Youngzoo\u2019s solo show at Brooklyn\u2019s Space ZeroOne\u2014on view until July 25\u2014the shadow and the attendant wormhole of light leap from one screen to another and another in many different direction. Behind the shadow is Youngzoo with a camera made for filming VR environments, cut to focus on the one point that is usually edited out: the emanating blind spot of the camera.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt is an image that captures the research question at the center of the show: Is an empty hole full of divinity or nothing at all? The 17 works in \u201cThe Late\u201d perhaps probe less at that question than the changing nature of the hole itself. From the empty graves (gamyo<\/em>) of Korean folk ritual to virtual cemeteries, Youngzoo\u2019s work draws a convincing line between the virtuality of spirituality and the belief systems coalescing around different emergent technologies, from NFTs and VR to AI. But it takes some detective work to detangle the web. At the center of the show are two works that share the same name as the exhibition: a seven-channel video work and a 1,254-page book that is the culmination of 10 years of research and experimentation on the meeting of ritual and technological belief.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen first entering the exhibition, the screens surround and overwhelm the viewer at all angles; many are embedded in nooks that one has to crawl into to reach. Though some of these screens display different video works, while others form\u00a0The Late<\/em>, all seem to tell pieces of the same story, albeit at different times and from different angles. On one screen, comforting words appeared as \u201cviewing instructions\u201d:<\/p>\n

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\n\tIf you are a Gwisin (characters, spirit) remains against the wall <\/p>\n

\n\tIf you are a bird, take your place above <\/p>\n

\n\tIf you are a camera with six eyes, stand wherever you please <\/p>\n

\n\tIf you are a human with two eyes in front, do the best you can<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n\tI spent hours in the exhibition, only to feel insecure that I had not put the pieces together. I was convinced that I missed something. It was only after I left the exhibition and began reading the accompanying book that the show began to collapse into stunning resolution. The book, like the exhibition, is overwhelming, resists linear reading, and purposefully drives the observer into a state of disorientation. Yet this disorientation is central to the pathos driving Youngzoo\u2019s work. The artist, her characters, the audience: we are all lost migratory birds who can no longer navigate this big earth through the invisible scientific or spiritual paths that order the world. In the experimental text, Youngzoo tries to find her way back into meaning through art and research.<\/p>\n

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An installation view of IM Youngzoo\u2019s \u201cThe Late\u201d at Space ZeroOne. In the foreground is Youngzoo\u2019s 1,254 page book, also called The Late<\/em>.<\/span>Courtesy the artist and Space ZeroOne<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tIf the difference between memoir and autofiction is that in the latter case one is not held to the standard of fact, Youngzoo\u2019s book is what I would call \u201cficto-research\u201d: research protected from fact by the poetic. The book blurs the line between ethnography, religious study, and media study and contains hundreds and hundreds of fascinating footnotes outlining everything from science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling\u2019s \u201cDead Media Theory\u201d to the role of birds in Korean shamanism.<\/p>\n

\n\tYet, despite a smattering of citations, the work is impossible to fact-check, much less peer-review. This is not to suggest the text presents itself as an academic work. The book is organized in chapters that are not necessarily sequential (there are three to five different ways of reading the book). Fragments of email correspondence appear alongside bits of dialogue, histories of apocalyptic movements in Korea, and poems about the nature of time and the Bardo (the Tibetan Buddhist concept for the transitional period between death and rebirth). A mysterious character, M, ducks behind the pages: are they IM, a friend of hers (often rendered with male pronouns), or a lost bird (mijo)? There are fabulous stories: a tale of a pair of grannies, one Korean and one Japanese, who speak to each other in birdsong; another in which the artist, following the advice of her grandmother, stared at the sun too long and, after a surgery, was left with doubled, unsynced vision between her two eyes (diplopia). In one scene, M takes VR goggles off of a rock-headed dummy, only to see the shape of a bird bloom in the darkness. These stories are woven into the \u201cresearch\u201d seamlessly: recordings of the grannies\u2019 birdsong are analyzed by ornithologists, the VR goggle scene follows an interview with a man who runs a VR experience parlor. Where the research ends and the fiction begins is impossible to demarcate.<\/p>\n

\n\tYet there is something in the book, in the work, in the image of Youngzoo that emerges from all of it, that makes me hesitate to call any of this \u201cfiction.\u201d Reading it, I felt that all of it could have happened because Youngzoo is the type of person who might experience the world in this way.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn illustrating her book not with pictures but with the video works and sculptures in the exhibition, that impossible space between virtuality and materiality comes alive on yet another dimensional line. Youngzoo\u2019s sculptural works ground the overwhelming refraction of the screens, especially\u00a0Orientation<\/em>\u00a0(2025\/2026). It is a wooden block with a Go board etched into its top. The Go board represents a \u201cmicro-universe\u201d according to the exhibition, due to \u201cits possible positions exceeding the number of atoms in the universe.\u201d Atop the Go board there lies a compass whose dials swing chaotically. If you crouch down, you can see that the compass is not just lying atop the Go board but floating two inches above it, wobbling and spinning on its axis. This piece can be read in the context of an event that rocked Koreans, and the world, in 2016. In March of that year, Korean Go world champion and grandmaster Lee Sedol lost to Google DeepMind\u2019s AlphaGo program in four out of five matches.<\/p>\n

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An installation view of IM Youngzoo\u2019s \u201cThe Late\u201d at Space ZeroOne<\/span>Courtesy the artist and Space ZeroOne<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tHow do we orient ourselves as the familiar universe and its coordinates are so severely challenged? Disorientation is a key motif across\u00a0The Late<\/em>, not just because of technological advancements, or the diminishment of the spiritual paradigms that used to guide us through life, but because the very act of trying to orient oneself, no matter the technique, is so fraught with danger.<\/p>\n

\n\tCopies of\u00a0The Late<\/em>, the book, can be found in a rectangular hole carved into a giant Go board where audience members can lie and peruse the text at their leisure. As one reads, what were once scattered images become illustrations of scenes from the book: that geological form is not just a giant mineral but Candlestick Rock, \u201cthe location of the first sunrise on Korea\u2019s east coast\u201d (137), and an important symbol for Youngzoo\u2019s chapter on the difficulty of syncing timed virtual experiences of the New Year during the Covid lockdown and the nature of time in general. That walk in the snow, and that strange costume: it is a ghillie suit! \u201cThe principle of the white ghillie suit is eliminating shadow\u201d (footnote 39, page 195). Youngzoo, or M, took a walk in the suit on the first day of the year to dig an empty grave in the snow. Each work is contained so fully in the text that it is as if each word was generated in tandem with each action. Like the Go board, the book is a micro-universe. Close by, the compass wobbles.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe world-building potential of research is a power not to be underestimated. If you have had parents, friends, loved ones walk down a spiritual, political, conspiratorial path that seems rife with delusion, isn\u2019t one sign of your distance from each other the research that they\u2019ve done, which they find so convincing, but which doesn\u2019t move you, which seems less like information and more like an awful trick? It\u2019s an experience that Youngzoo is familiar with. After art school, she spent her twenties seeking enlightenment and met a yoga teacher she trusted. The teacher planned a trip to India for Youngzoo and her friends, which they paid for. It ended up being a scam and Youngzoo lost her life savings in an act of extreme spiritual betrayal. Over the subsequent years, Youngzoo rebuilt her life and returned to art. Youngzoo\u2019s research is one that moves me, because like good research it obsesses over the shape of a question rather than answering it. And yet that question reverberates in the shape of that giant book. After all the work and careful construction, it\u2019s still all (just?) belief.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/s01-16.png?w=1024″] It\u2019s hot out and the sun must be at its zenith because you can spot a woman\u2019s shadow against the parched asphalt as she walks down the street. The woman, however, isn\u2019t quite visible. Sometimes you see a bit of her hat, her jacket, or her hands, but mostly she is obscured […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2020861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2020861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020861\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2020861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2020861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2020861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}